Moss’s actions, so Terrell County pays the wages of Bell’s moral failure. Bell leaves behind him a county that is demoralized and shot up, Moss and Carla Jean dead, and an incompetent police force that is in no position to handle the next onslaught. An unnamed reporter asks Bell one last question before he hangs up his badge: “Sheriff, how come you let crime get so out of hand in your county?” (304). An Epilogue As I write this essay's conclusion, more than a million Americans have died of COVID-19, with the United States leading the world in per capita cases and deaths (World Health Organization 2022). Even before the killer pandemic, healthcare infrastructure was decayed due to a lack of public funding, and health workers were overworked to the point of underperforming (Anderlini 2018). For too many Americans, it has been impossible to stay ahead of the virus’s relentless onslaught. And yet, America has failed to respond as a coherent collective, with leaders that have seemed at times self-serving, apathetic, or simply inept. McCarthy’s archetypes speak clearly to this context. The questions that need asking amidst the political posturing, the self-righteousness, the insistence on individual rights, is not just what is good for us as individuals, but what we owe to society as a whole. The killer’s success in breaking down Terrell County in 1980 parallels the present-day breakdown of America’s economy, social structures, and health care systems, with too much moral authority ascribed to individual interiority (Mangrum 110). In the end, none of the three archetypal characters in No Country leave neutral legacies behind them, despite their implicit belief that their actions are nobody else’s business. None succeed in establishing and maintaining the closed circuit that forms the moral foundation of rugged individualism. Even Bell, who does no harm directly, is morally at fault for the suffering allowed by his passive negligence. His tragic realization of his culpability comes too late. No Country for Old Men shows that the ideology does not work. As Americans resisted vaccinations and masks, despite rampant hospitalizations and deaths, they did so in the name of individual freedom over the collective good. Holding themselves immune from the consequences, America’s rugged individuals put its most vulnerable citizens at risk. In the era of COVID-19, America is no country for old men, or poor men. It suffers under the illusion that it is a country of lone men fastened to the lie of their own immunity. 106
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